While the present invention is generally in the field of timed automatic delivery of predetermined messages over a telephone system, it is particularly suited to the environment of a large private branch exchange requiring timed delivery of repetitious messages to selected subscriber lines on the exchange. Thus, it is particularly suited to the environment of hotels and motels for delivering a message commonly referred to as a "wake-up call", for delivering information as to services available within the hotel, and for providing emergency messages.
For many years, a custom of operators of hotel and motel establishments has been to provide a service for waking up customers in particular rooms at a particular time of day. Since the advent of the telephone, this is commonly done by calling the room of the quest at a predetermined time selected by the quest some time before retiring to bed. It is customary to keep a manual or computerized log of which rooms are to be called at what time of day in order to provide the wake-up service. Experience has shown that requests for wake-up calls tend to be clustered around certain times of the morning and a high volume of wake-up calls must be provided by the hotel staff.
More recently, automated and semi-automated provision of predetermined messages for wake-up calls have been provided. However, previous systems have not adequately taken into account the problem of traffic load for wake-up calls clustered around particular times of day. This tends to make a significant portion of the calls at a heavy traffic time late in arriving at the guest's room.
Also, it is desirable once an automatic calling system is provided to provide a heretofore unknown block calling procedure wherein a particular message may be delivered sequentially to a plurality of PBX lines (rooms) for, example, indicating that a certain activity is being provided within the hotel or that a fire is in progress.
The former example is quite useful when a particular group of people, such as attendees at a convention, are booked into a block of rooms and wish to be notified when certain meetings, etc. pertinent to their convention are taking place. The latter example is, of course, one example of delivery of an emergency message to occupants of a room most likely to be affected by an emergency situation. For example, if a fire alarm has been activated in a particular wing of a hotel, it may be desirable to enter a short sequence of instructions indicating that certain blocks of rooms should be called with a message indicating that that portion of the hotel is to be evacuated.